How Wallet could fit in with other Google tools, correlate your own data, removing content from search.

Google Wallet

Last week, Google unveiled Google Wallet, which on the one hand, might be the future of payments, but on the other hand, seems like it’s just using your phone instead of your credit card to pay for things. And phones so far are bulkier to carry around than credit cards. But Google says:

… because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk.

Wallet will be integrated with Google Offers (Google’s answer to Groupon) and one can imagine the possible future integrations. For instance, Google could manage travel from start to finish by integrating elements of its ITA acquisition for booking, Hotpot and Places for reviews and maps, and Wallet for paying on the go.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has been sued for hiring talent away from a competitor. And since they had the two key ex-PayPal employees introduce Google Wallet publicly, they weren’t exactly keeping things on the down low to avoid this lawsuit.

Google’s worldwide market share

This column is “Search Notes,” not “Google Notes,” so why so much Google coverage? The fact is Google is the dominant search engine worldwide, more so even outside the U.S.
Along those lines, as I was finalizing slides for a conference session in Germany, I double checked Google’s search share there. I found that Google’s share was relatively unchanged year over year, at more than 90% for Germany, France, the UK, and Spain. This week, comScore noted that Google is at more than 90% share in Latin America as well.

Removing content from Google

Last fall, I wrote two fairly detailed articles about removing content from Google search results:

What is really interesting, and is quite obvious for some, is that PayPal wisely waited to sue after Google Wallet was introduced to the public. The company knew that Tilenius and Bedier went to Google and that other PayPal employees had left for Google. It also knew Google was developing a mobile payments platform. PayPal says it has been negotiating with Bedier, since his departure in January, for the return of information that it claims are its trade secrets and he’s refused to comply.
Had PayPal sued before the public introduction of Google Wallet — which Google says it has been working on for over a year — PayPal could have been able to delay the launch of the product.
the potential damage to PayPal’s mobile business is clear. PayPal wants to build out a mobile developer ecosystem around payments with itself at the center; this is also what Google seeks to do.
Google may offer a stronger value proposition than Paypal to consumers, merchants and advertisers. This doesn’t mean that PayPal mobile won’t be able to develop a strong business; in some respects Google Wallet might help PayPal by accelerating the growth of mobile payments generally.
Google doesn’t win every market segment it enters: Google Checkout, when it was introduced, was supposed to be a “PayPal killer.” However Android has arguably become Google’s second most successful product after search and Wallet can piggyback to some degree on Android.